It'd take a steel heart to watch a film full of the painfully beautiful music and poetry of Leonard Cohen, and one in which the two main characters die in the end, and not well up at least a tiny bit. My heart is made of much less durable alloys so, predictably, I ended up with 'something in my eye' on more than one occasion.
A listen to Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye is enough to elicit tears even without context so it's hardly a surprise that set against a backdrop of love, heartbreak, friendship, and reflections on mortality, it should set me off. But Nick Broomfield's Marianne & Leonard:Words of Love didn't just set about making us feel sad and it wasn't interested in acting as some kind of hagiographic study of either Cohen, the artist, or Ihlen, his 'muse'.
We start at the end, Ihlen on her death bed in Oslo receiving Cohen's above message, but we're soon sent back nearly fifty years to the Isle of Wight festival and Cohen performing So Long, Marianne in a state he refers to, later in the film, as "relaxed beyond any reasonable state". He'd taken so many Quaaludes he'd earned the nickname Captain Mandrax and even then, in 1970, it looked as if he'd become a different man to the unsuccessful, but hard working, passionate, and questing poet that had met, and fallen in love, with a young Norwegian woman on the stunning Greek island of Hydra a decade earlier.
Broomfield's trademark, and now unmistakable, voiceover speaks of Hydra in the early sixties as some sort of Mediterranean paradise and certainly it felt very different to Cohen's snowy home city of Montreal. It was a place of magical night air, freshly baked bread, golden sun kissed people, sex, and LSD. A place where the few non-Greek residents (like the tragically doomed Johnston family who helped Cohen with his early work) all seemed to be poets, artists, or drug dealers.
Cohen described an ordinary day as one that would involve working, eating a sandwich, having sex, and doing some speed. At least two of these things would be provided by Ihlen who'd moved to the island with her first husband Axel Jensen in 1958 and given birth to a son, Axel Jr, on Hydra. Jensen had a temper and eventually left Marianne to live with another woman.
Cohen was completely different. When he entered her life she began to love not just herself but life itself. Neither of them considered themselves attractive (we hear archive recordings of Ihlen bemoaning her small boobs). Cohen took on Axel Jr as if he was his own and Ihlen supported Cohen when writing his last, difficult and critically maligned, novel. 1966's Beautiful Losers was described as 'hallucinogenic madness', as one might expect of a book primarily written in blazing midsummer Greek sun on a diet of acid and speed. Critics described it as 'revolting' and dismissed it as 'verbal masturabtion' and even though you'd think that would be enough to tempt people in it still didn't sell well. Certainly not well enough to pay the rent.
But who's read Leonard Cohen's books anyway? He decided if he couldn't make a living in literature he'd set his words to music but he'd been so isolated in Hydra that he had no idea of what was going on musically in the wider world. His natural home was the folk scene but he'd never even heard of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, or Phil Ochs.
When he played a version of Suzanne to singer/songwriter Judy Collins she was blown away. She loved it so much she, first, recorded her own version and then persuaded Cohen himself to sing it in public. Something he had never intended to do, imaging his career in music would be that of a songwriter and a songwriter only.
He was so nervous and emotional at his first ever live performance that he broke down in tears and walked off stage. Watching that, and a later performance of Chelsea Hotel No.2, you're inclined to join him in lachrymosity. He finally returned to the stage and soon he started to love performing as much as he did writing.
Columbia Records liked him too. They signed him up, a string of remarkable records followed, and Cohen was, of course, sent out to tour them. As he travelled, and his fame increased, Ihlen was left on Hydra with Axel Jr. Understandably to anybody who's ever been in love, they missed each other intensely, but Cohen's request for Ihlen and Axel to move to Montreal with him backfired disastrously.
Montreal did not seem the perfect family life they'd dreamed of and was a very unhappy time. The film doesn't go into too much detail as to why but it seems unlikely that Ihlen would have been overly happy with Cohen singing confessional songs about getting blow jobs from Janis Joplin. Ihlen saw just how loved Cohen was, she saw how compassionate he was, and she knew how handsome he was. She felt she was losing him. She felt suicidal.
As their relationship deteriorated, Cohen describes throwing himself into a 'blue movie' and 'gaining favours' from enormous numbers of women. But then goes on to say that we all know 'blue movies are not romantic'. Being a hit with the ladies, a huge success, and having what many testify was a great sense of humour does not protect you against depression and Cohen was riven with it.
At times he fell into such dark spells that people, even band members, would say they'd not see, or speak to, him for up to six weeks. Record producer John Lissauer describes a seven year period of estrangement . He was called back to produce the album Various Positions, which contained the slow burning future standard Hallelujah, in 1984 before leaving the music business entirely and without fanfare. Cohen's guitarist Ron Cornelius describes how Cohen's experience of depression had given him such an empathetic stance on mental illness that he insisted they play a gig at an institution.
A suggestion, Cornelius says now, that initially went down like "a fart in a diver's helmet" but one that, despite that, both happened and was such a huge success that Cohen, Cornelius, and band went on to give many more live performances in facilities for the mentally unwell.
As Cohen battled with his demons, either trying to shag his way out of them or swim his way out of them (he often rose at 5am to swim lengths in hotel pools, naked whenever permitted), Marianne and Axel's lives were spinning out of control. Ihlen spent time living in a squat in Kentish Town with Broomfield himself (who I was surprised to find out had skin in the game) and Axel spent most of his adult life institutionalised.
Marianne Ihlen returned to Oslo where she married Jan not once, but twice, and spent the rest of her life as a housewife and a secretary while, at the same time, Cohen's career and life took ever more bizarre turns. Acid was given to donkeys, festivals were played in Aix-en-Provence to a sea of pasty white bums and humping hippies, and 1977's Death of Ladies Man (featuring the you have to hear it to believe it Don't Go Home With Your Hard-On) saw Cohen working with Phil Spector who proved to be an ever bigger liability than even Cohen had expected.
Spector's life, Cohen recalls, was spent permanently drunk and there were guns everywhere. Guns lying around the floor, guns in cakes (!), and guns being quite regularly pointed at people's heads. It doesn't sound fun and Cohen was unhappy in Los Angeles so eventually he ordained as a Buddhist monk and went to live in a monastery. No small life change.
While he was in the monastery, his manager and friend (and remarkably someone he went on to speak favourably about) Kelley Lynch stole all his money. Cohen had no choice but to tour again, he was skint, and set about it with no little gusto. His twilight years as a jobbing musician, each night pulling ever more exquisite rabbits out from underneath his trademark fedora, were a huge success. Packing out enormodromes like the O2 to rapt audiences of all ages who were probably only too aware that their chances of seeing him in the flesh were getting slimmer all the time.
Hearts were won over as sure as monies were recouped, even Marianne turned up to a gig to sing a long to songs written about her forty years earlier with a tear in her eye. It was a coda to a life well lived. It certainly wasn't a perfect life. Cohen, in his quest for truth, for love, and, often it seems, for oblivion and salvation, made many mistakes but, in the end, he did right by those closest to him.
Despite the happiness of her later marriage, it seemed that Marianne Ihlen still carried something of Leonard Cohen inside her for the rest of her life (perhaps we all do, it's hard to ever truly stop loving somebody even if the expression of that love stops becoming physical) and he, also, quite clearly, carried something of her within his heart until his death, just three months after Marianne's.
Nick Broomfield proved to be less cynical than I'd expected with this film. I laughed at Masha Cohen, Leonard's Russian mum, being described as a great singer but a 'mad' lady, chortled at anecdotes telling of Cohen's friend, Irving Layton, always asking him "are you sure you're doing the wrong thing?", and I puzzled over what involvement The Dream Academy's Nick Laird-Clowes had in the film. But, most of all, I felt emotional and, yes, tearful. The tears of sadness, at the end however, were replaced with salty tears of joy as I realised this film was a wonderful testament to love. Not just love of romantic partners but love of music, love of life, and love of friendship.
A paean to human connection if you will. As Cohen wrote in Bird on a Wire, another song inspired by Marianne Ihlen, "for like a baby, stillborn, like a beast with his horn I have torn everyone who reached out for me. But I swear by this song and by all that I have done wrong I will make it all up to thee".
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